The time has finally come to unveil the cover and announce a release date for Some Side Effects May Occur​.

I don't mind sharing that this YA body-horror novel set in the not too distant future has been, without hyperbole, the single most difficult project I've ever worked on, taking me through some of the sicker corners of my brain, but it's finally complete, and without further ado, I'm proud to share a first glimpse of it!

Rachel Blum isn’t beautiful — yet. But she’s got it all figured out. All she has to do is save up enough money as a medical test subject to have her nose fixed, and make sure her friends and family don’t notice that she’s stopped eating. It’ll all be worth it if she can get chosen as a promising new talent by the Public Aesthetics Endowment, giving her access to all the loan money she’ll need to have her body made fully camera-ready, so her acting career can finally begin.

When one of the labs she works for begins trials for a miracle beauty supplement called Swan, Rachel’s skeptical of its claims. No more starving. No more sweating. No more surgery. She’s heard that pitch before. But this treatment is different. There’s no denying it when she drops fifteen pounds and grows three inches overnight. There’s no denying it when she scores both the next lead role in Roberts High’s legendary drama department and the attentions of its uncontested leading man. And there’s certainly no denying it when her newly out-of-control appetite for flesh starts becoming murderously selective.

Prepare for a grisly and haunting tale of one girl’s quest to be good enough at last.

This one's hitting shelves on September 5th, 2017, but you can preorder it now:

Bobbi Morse, A.K.A Mockingbird, is a superhero. Not that her bosses at S.H.I.E.L.D or her former idols on the camera-facing core lineup of the Avengers tend to notice much, but she is a scientist and martial artist who helps people for a living. She particularly excels at talking down mutant twelve-year-old girls who can’t get anyone else to explain what’s happening to their bodies, and bailing out Hawkeye, who’s totally not her boyfriend.

The Downside:

While I find it works well enough, the non-linear presentation of these five issues may frustrate many readers and doesn’t add exceptionally much.

The Upside:

Bobbi exemplifies the best possible version of the terms “attitude” and “snark,” in potently concentrated doses. She’s the angry, undervalued female superhero who knows exactly what she has to be angry about and how to point it out in a few sharply chosen words at exactly the right moments, before continuing to get the job done.

The sarcastic sense of humor here is constant without ever feeling forced, and toys with Marvel conventions, not only about gender, but about such tropes as hordes of faceless non-human enemies (allowing heroes to show off their fighting skills without looking like jerks) and the dubious morality of S.H.I.E.L.D’s shadowy government status.

The dysfunctional relationship between Bobbi and Hawkeye is the real treat of this volume, and detracts nothing from her character. Quite the opposite. This is where things gets complicated, and we get to see, as cool as she is, why Bobbi Morse is not someone you want to be. Or be anywhere near.

Bobbi is a bad significant other. Really bad. Almost as bad as the average male superhero, but unlike those guys, her story doesn’t pretend otherwise. She’s that aloof, dishonest, emotionally abusive partner who will nevertheless show up to save you whenever you need it, the one you can’t help liking in those rare moments when things are going well.

In other words, she’s an action hero with a love interest.

Depending on how much patience you have for the abundance of bad male partners in fiction, Bobbi can be viewed either as a welcome reversal, giving the woman a chance to be the layered jerk for a change, or as a commentary on why this archetype is so readily accepted the other way around in the first place.

Altogether, this is a series I’ll definitely be following for as long as it- What? It’s already been cancelled?

Typical. Right, Bobbi?

​

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

The Lumberjanes are a scouting organization for, in the words of the back cover, “Badass Lady-Types.” Beyond earning survival badges and forging friendships (“to the max!”), the girls have to contend with a whole forest full of paranormal weirdness.

The Upside:

It’s harmless and intermittently cute, with a few educational interludes and the occasional laugh, appropriate for pre-teens getting into comics and looking for positive representations of female friendship.

The Downside:

The modern comic book renaissance has many better examples to offer of all the above positive elements.

Lumberjanes attempts to imitate the optimistic, lighthearted style of female-led peers like Squirrel Girl, Ms. Marvel, and even Harley Quinn, but seems to have confused “lighthearted” with “insubstantial.” In an apparent effort to demonstrate the independence and competence of the Lumberjanes, every obstacle they face falls before the might of their teamwork and smarts, effortlessly and within seconds, eliminating the possibility of any tension or stakes.

The girls are fairly interchangeable, particularly in their bulletproof self-confidence which, while admirable in role models for girls, leaves little room for conflict or even self-discovery when the entire main cast shares this same immunity to all doubt.

What plot exists is instead pushed along by bizarre paranormal phenomena that come and go not only without explanation (which can work), but without resolution or any identifiable point, at least not within this first volume.

The bright colors and mood of wacky hijinks are probably sufficient to entertain younger readers while introducing concepts like anagrams and the Fibonacci sequence, but there’s nothing here to earn the firm stamp of crossover appeal that Lumberjanes seems to aspire to.

​Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

After R’s return to life from zombiehood and the cascade of change his recovery has sparked in all of zombiekind, the world is in a delicate state of flux, its population on the verge of reclaiming its humanity on a colossal scale.

And the evil doesn’t like that at all.

This time, the forces of order through destruction and domination take a new form, no longer flesheating skeletons but a continent-wide network of insincerely smiling suits who call themselves the Axiom Group, determined to control or eliminate the resurrection power that seems to stem from R and Julie’s love. Along with their few surviving friends, the pair take off in search of some way to preserve what they’ve only begun to build together, but Axiom is dangerous for more than its weapons and numbers. It carries a connection to the pre-zombie life that R can’t remember and doesn’t want. Fighting Axiom means allowing its secrets to resurface from the basement of his mind, secrets that threaten to overwrite the very life he’s trying to hold onto.

The Downside:

The Burning World is decidedly more meandering than its predecessor. The frequent interludes narrated by the collective consciousness of all accumulated human experience are sometimes insightful and do include some plot setup for the end, but their quantity when combined with the more essential flashbacks to R’s first life slow the forestory down severely in places. It doesn’t help that much of that forestory, when we do get back to it, is taken up with our heroes rehashing new permutations of the same argument about the fact that they have no solid plan.

Abram, the group’s newest ally of convenience, constantly belittling and overruling Julie gets particularly grating, especially when he’s routinely right about her ideas being fickle and unhelpful. The ultimate point is the good one that everyone is uncertain, flailing in the dark, and making things up as they go just as much as R is, Julie included, and R can love her even better as a flawed, human equal than as an ideal on a pedestal, but this directionless flailing, however realistic, is unsatisfying in a narrative, and is only resolved in time for a lead-in to the third and final book, rather than a climax of its own. Meanwhile, this validated dismissal of the primary female character’s input seems to run counter to the general message of universal human respect, as do a few other small instances.

There’s a moment when R insists on running into a seemingly suicidal fight, asks Julie to stay behind out of danger, and leaves her with the thought that “she’ll either respect my wishes, or she won’t.” She doesn’t, of course, and he doesn’t hold this against her, but the hypocrisy of his hope that she will “respect his wishes” for her safety in the exact moment he’s disregarding her identical wishes for his, is never called out, so it’s difficult to tell whether such a moment is an excessively subtle piece of the overall commentary, or simply a contradiction that slipped by.

The Upside:

For all that, The Burning World makes abundantly clear where its heart lies, and it earns an A still bordering on an A+ for the weight of its content combined with the sheer poetry of its execution -- no less than readers have learned to expect of Isaac Marion.

R’s trek through both his present and past is a harrowing, blistering tour of every excuse ever concocted to deny a person’s humanity, or the value of humanity’s better nature altogether.

Because I have my own family to worry about first.

Because I’m too small to help.

Because God wants it this way.

Because there is no God, or any other form of purpose or point, so we might as well take what we please from whoever has it.

Because the fact that I have more than someone else must somehow prove that I did something to deserve it.

Because I am a real person, and they, for whatever quibbling difference of biology or geography, are not.

And so on.

This is the story of an ex-zombie, an ex-nothing, who thought all he wanted was to be a person with a life and now must decide what kind of person he is and what to do with that life. It’s the story of a man trying to build an identity in a world that largely considers masculinity and humanity to be synonymous, and measures both by one’s ability to establish a distinction of “us versus them” and cling to the winning side of it. It’s about the strength it takes to step back from that quickest route to feeling like a person and say no, I can do better than that.

The Burning World builds on Warm Bodies’ unique critique of the zombie genre’s usual hyper-indulgence of the instinct to dehumanize an enemy, developing the concept into a brutal and timely skewering of apathy, greed, and rationalized cruelty, while rooting itself back in the original’s celebration of life, of connection, communication, love, and the determination to create something better than what was there before. These are still the cure to unfeeling, unthinking, ever-consuming zombiehood itself.

At the same time, this remains a deeply personal story as well, pushing R and Julie’s relationship past the rush of first discovering each other and into the challenge of balancing and bridging their separate private struggles and impossible hopes for themselves.

Through all the themes large and small, the prose is, as ever, lyrical yet direct, unapologetically passionate, and able to make even the most obvious and universal of feelings fresh and new.

While Warm Bodies is the more satisfyingly self-contained read, and one I would recommend to anyone, I second Marion’s assertion that The Burning World can be read out of order. And maybe it can’t wait for the time it takes to catch up. As he says, this is a book for now.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

The Basics:
On the night of a Christmas Eve blizzard, Jubilee is trapped in a strange town after her parents’ arrest, Tobin and his two best friends embark on a quest for a Waffle House full of cheerleaders, and Addie is determined to prove her capacity for selflessness at least to her friends, if not to the ex she can’t let go. The three searches for love, each written by a different rightly renowned YA author, interlock and collide amid holiday miracles.

The Downside:

The last story of the three, Addie’s, falls into the unfortunate role of having to tie all the threads together for the others, making it the weakest in its own right, and leaving Addie’s personal epiphany feeling as though it’s sparked simply by reaching the point in her arc where she’s supposed to have an epiphany, rather than by natural progression.

The use of a Waffle House full of snowed-in cheerleaders as the unifying ingredient across the three stories doesn’t always come across quite as sensitively as is clearly the intent. After seeing them used as a symbol and canvas for several other characters to project their differing attitudes, I would have loved to see the multi-perspective format used to take us inside the life of one of the cheerleaders to see how she views herself, but no such luck.

The ultimate message seems to be that they’re not mystical creatures, they’re not property to be controlled, and that the coolest girls are the non-cheerleaders who don’t allow themselves to be used as sexual accessories to the more respected exploits of boys, which is all good stuff. However, the female perspective to this effect rings a bit hollow when the characters providing it are always in a position of jealousy, and the male dehumanization of the cheerleaders is harder to accept as the curable youthful ignorance and lack of communication it’s meant to be when those male characters are endowed with all the intellect, perceptiveness, and perspicacity required to deliver John Green dialogue.

The Upside:

Whatever accidental inconsistencies they may cause in the characters’ social awareness and aptitude, John Green’s sharp wit and evident heart are as enjoyable as ever in Tobin’s struggle with the terrifying prospect of taking a chance on the female best friend he loves, rather than searching for the next pretty girl he’s not afraid to lose. Lauren Myracle brings her usual vivid rendering of high school friendship in spite of the confines of the final story, and Maureen Johnson (the one whose other work I’m least familiar with), starts things off with a bang, or rather, with a double-dose of the humor and genuine sweetness that runs throughout all three storylines.

While the three stories are each capable of standing alone (the first two especially), and all three authors play to their own strengths, occasionally even with some gentle fun poked at each other, the snowed-in town and the tone of romantic holiday spirit are seamlessly cohesive.

Let It Snow is like a smaller scale, teenage version of Love, Actually, without the inexplicable fat jokes or creepy theme of powerful men exploiting female subordinates, but with all the unabashedly heartstring-tugging sentimentality and double the smiles.

Pity this review is going up in February, thanks to receiving the book as a perfect Christmas present, but… belated Valentine’s Day reading, anyone?

​Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

In a ’50s retro-styled dystopian future, women are no longer shunned, shamed, undermined, ridiculed, or ignored when at odds with the interests of the men in power. No, they’re much more efficiently shipped out of sight, out of mind, to the penal space colony commonly known as Bitch Planet! But now, a group of new arrivals have been offered the opportunity to win favor by forming their own team to compete in Earth’s most popular sport, Megaton. For amusement and novelty purposes only, of course. Still, with nothing to lose, the women hope to turn this small chance for unity and visibility to their advantage.

The Downside:

Being as concept-centric as it sounds, character development falls mostly by the wayside. In fact, I can and will write this entire review without mentioning a single name. The sports team plot also doesn’t come to much, at least not in this opening volume, and that lack of a satisfying, climactic feeling of fighting back is a bit disappointing.

The Upside:

In spite of the slightness of the storytelling, Bitch Planet shines in the sheer detail of its satire. It more than shines. It sparks and glows and blazes with the heat of a thousand suns. This comic is a finely-tuned, well-oiled, bullshit-calling machine.

Each issue ends with a page of parody oldschool comic ads for things like weight-loss intestinal parasites and agreeability-enhancing drugs, easily the funniest parts but also a sharp calling out of female-targeted marketing and its unending encouragement and exploitation of body hate and any other shred of an inferiority complex it can reach.

Meanwhile, the main storyline calls out not only the unfair, belittling social standards for what a woman should be (“Skinny!” “Deferential!” “Nurturing!” “Accommodating!”), but also the shifting, contradictory, no-win nature of those standards. Written into the charges briefly attached to each introduced inmate, charges including not only “infidelity” and “marital withholding” but “wanton obesity” and “seduction and disappointment,” mini-stories are succinctly told of women sent to Bitch Planet for being undesirable, for being desirable and willing, and for being desirable and unwilling, among a host of other offenses.

In the first few pages, and through a deliciously Twilight Zone­-esque expectation fakeout, we’re even introduced to a woman condemned to Bitch Planet on an rush emergency warrant so that her husband can marry his much younger mistress, protesting all the way that she did everything right.

As one member of the new Bitch Planet Megaton team notes, about the sport but clearly not about the sport, “They change the rules when it suits them.”

Just like in real life, no matter how low the women are willing to stoop, no matter how many absurd double-standards they meet, there’s no surefire way to avoid getting sent to Bitch Planet. They’re sent there for any reason and every reason, but always ultimately for the same reason: because it’s convenient to someone more important.

While there’s certainly no pretense of subtlety to the commentary (and none needed), Bitch Planet completely avoids the common pitfall of “message” pieces, in which characters so often monologue at length about complex real world issues in painfully trite, oversimplified, and out-of-character ways. It barely discusses misogyny at all, in so many words, but has the restraint and artistry instead to show it on every page, starkly, honestly drawn out to its logical sci-fi conclusion, and the effect is glorious.

Yes or no to reading on in the series? With fingers crossed to see some characters properly blossom in this finely crafted universe, definitely yes.

​Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

I’m finally going for it. Up until this point, I’ve primarily kept the reviews on this site to novels and screen adaptations of novels, with the occasional exception for other major geek movies, short story collections, and miscellaneous.

I have not regularly reviewed my comic book reading, mainly because I consider prose novels more my specialty, being, y’know, a novelist and all.

However, with a decent amount of comic geekery also under my belt, and with much of my recent and planned near-future writing being superhero satire collaborations with my husband (Matt Carter of Almost Infamous: A Supervillain Novel), and with a giant stack of comic books from under the Christmas tree likely to fill my recreational reading schedule for some time, I’m taking you guys along for the ride!

Heads up, I read by the volume, or occasionally the compendium, not by the issue, and with my storytelling expertise generally resting in a far less visual arena, I won’t emphasize the artwork heavily in my ratings, unless something strikes me as mind-blowingly good or bad.

Laura Kinney, aka X-23, has taken up the Wolverine mantel from Logan, the original Wolverine and her clone-dad (because chromosomes and DNA are completely extricable in superheroland; go with it). When she discovers that more clones of her exist, and have escaped from their lab to wreak havoc, she sets off to track them down and defuse the situation before they can be exterminated by one organization or another that assumes they’re inhuman monsters.

The Downside:

Pause, time-out, and cue obligatory dialogue on the common practice of creating female versions of popular male superheroes:

Some women (not unreasonably) celebrate this kind of fast-tracked inclusion into the recognizable super pantheons and the much-needed representation it adds, while some argue (also not unreasonably) that the assumed need to piggyback on a male character’s legacy in order to be noteworthy is insulting. Some fans of the copied male characters argue (not always unreasonably) that the female versions tend to be written as pale imitations and end up sounding or feeling inadvertently sexist for favoring the male originals, while multitudes of assholes (completely unreasonably) hide behind this guise of loyalty to the originals in order to be definitely sexist and rail against the concept of female characters who function as anything other than prizes existing at all.

It’s a shitshow of an issue, and it has many full articles devoted to it, and it deserves many more.

So let’s skip the big picture for now and focus on the story at hand and its individual effectiveness.

Anyone expecting Laura to be Logan will be disappointed. As she’ll tell you herself, she’s not. She’s not the same over-the-top killing machine he was either. But that’s not a bad thing.

Back to our regularly scheduled downside. The twist-cliffhanger of this volume could have been better set up, and the simple fact that much of the cast is made up of clones makes it a little difficult to keep track visually of who’s where in some of the faster action scenes.

The Upside:

Laura’s an instantly likeable hero, and the challenge of establishing a character born in a beloved older character’s shadow combines beautifully with her nature as a weaponized clone (now one of many), to create a well-fueled tale of identity crisis and self-discovery.

Logan and Angel are also enjoyable in their brief roles, acting as a refreshingly positive mentor and boyfriend respectively, without hijacking the story, and Doctor Fate’s appearance is a comedic highlight.

Altogether, while the clone conspiracy plotline is duly serious, it’s the self-aware humor and believable affection between the characters that makes this series opener memorable, and makes me look forward to more.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

So, is a Black Widow movie ever going to get out of early development?

Will Disney ever get over its fear of having its new superhero sub-department contaminated by the female market segment, and give girls everywhere the stories and toys they’re clamoring to pay good money for?

Will our daughters’ daughters someday be able to live in a world where a movie that lists a female hero’s name second in its title isn’t considered radically progressive?

I don’t know.

But in this particularly difficult time of setback for women, I’d like to take a moment to recognize the fact that we’re living in a renaissance of actual, paper-and-ink comic books that respect and celebrate female power.

This alternate DC timeline follows some of the most prominent female characters of the universe as they develop their identities – independent of the often male-mentored circumstances of their main universe origins – against the backdrop of World War II.

The sexual prejudices of the forties exist here to be faced but never hold the characters down for long, especially once Amanda Waller begins to earmark superpowered women for her alternate universe, Hitler-fighting Suicide Squad – The Bombshells.

Sadly, this title didn’t run for long, but I highly recommend grabbing the two volumes that exist.

Jennifer Walters (a.k.a She-Hulk) is the professional woman’s hero. After leaving a prestigious law firm that expected something different from her than good legal work (ostensibly because of her superpowers, but the parallel to her gender is clear), she’s determined to start up her own successful law firm. Naturally, her first solo case drags her into a far-reaching conspiracy that tests her skills, her principles, and most importantly, her ability to count on her substantial brains instead of her physical talent for smashing.

This is possibly the funniest and most good-hearted comic in existence. It’s self-aware and optimistic, and Doreen Green’s confidence and genuine kindness are wonderfully infectious. She loves her curves, she loves her friends of both the human and squirrel variety, she loves her work helping people, and she goes out of her way to love her villains.

She’s the unbeatable Squirrel Girl, because she’s the hero who takes the time to chat with Galactus about his eating habits, after a discussion on the evolution of gendered pronouns that warms this English major’s heart.

She’s exactly what’s needed for both young girls looking to get into comics that welcome them, and for adult readers who need a break from the doom-and-gloom of other comics.

…Then again, sometimes you need a hit of the grown-up dark and serious. That’s where Jessica Jones comes in. She’s the gritty anti-hero with all the flaws and baggage of her most popular and fascinating male counterparts, which makes her refreshing in her own way, because flaws are exactly the critical character component that’s so often lost in the effort to make female characters “strong” enough.

Jessica’s a hardboiled private investigator with a drinking problem and a past made of horror and failure. She’s an inconsiderate, self-destructive mess, and she’s exactly who you want on your side when you need to get to the bottom of a mystery for the right cause. She’s crude and sad and smart and infuriating, and utterly compelling on every page.

There are no words adequate to express the importance or coolness of Kamala Khan (a.k.a. Ms. Marvel). She has the kind heart and optimism of Squirrel Girl in the #3 spot, but with far less insulation from serious, real-life issues.

Kamala is the new hero of Jersey City, somewhere people like the Avengers don’t tend to pay much attention to protecting. She’s also in the thick of growing up a millennial Muslim girl in the U.S, facing challenges both universal and specific, and always complex and relatably presented.

She’s new to her powers, bringing back the superhero metaphor for the combined terror and empowerment of puberty, and through everything from family fights to bad dates to chaos-sewing visits from Loki, the reader gets to watch her grow into a hero for a new generation.

Got more favorite female-led comics to recommend? Comment below!

Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Fellow equality-loving bookworms, what is it we’ve been shouting for the past few months?

“When they go low, we go high.”

We still can.

Sorry to be cheeseball in this time of mourning, but the cure for hate and oppression is the same as it always has been: compassion and education.

Peaceful demonstrations are a nice gesture to show off how much we care, but if you really want to stick it to bigotry, here’s a list of organizations that can help you put your passion and skills as book lovers to constructive use right now, helping the people who need allies most.

Most of these organizations are LA-based, but a few are nationwide, and there are more like them wherever you happen to be.

I chose them for their ability to put reading and writing skills to good use, as this blog is mainly for readers and writers, but there are many other ways of helping groups currently under attack through methods as simple as filing and answering phones.

There are options for people who want to dive in headfirst, and options for people who have a couple hours a month to spare, or who prefer to make monetary donations.

If you have other suggestions for worthy ways to contribute, feel free to post below.

There. I said it. And it shouldn’t have been this difficult or taken this long.

You may have noticed an uncharacteristic amount of silence from me in the weeks preceding yesterday’s election. That’s in large part because I couldn’t bring myself to carry on talking about coffee and zombies as if the question of whether this country could yet pass a test of basic human decency was not on the table, or as if this question was not important.

I also couldn’t bring myself to speak openly about that question itself, because of the standard industry wisdom that a new author should not discuss politics, should not discuss anything that might offend or alienate anyone.

The wisdom that while we can write diverse and revolutionary stories in our books (because who’s going to read what’s in a book anyway?), we should not be publicly seen to discuss anything of substance.

I accepted that wisdom as a necessary evil, until yesterday, when a man who says whatever vile thing pops into his head – no matter how objectively offensive and wrong – went up against a woman who is polished and politic to a fault, and won the White House.

I’m tired of being quiet and polite about everyone else’s opinions while a man who can’t be polite about other people’s basic human rights is lauded and rewarded for “telling it like it is.”

He’s wrong. If you support him, you are wrong.

I don’t care if that’s impolitic to say. It’s also impolitic to label an entire ethnic group rapists while bragging about your own history of committing sexual assault. And it’s so much more than impolitic. It’s wrong.

Yes, everyone has the right to an opinion. Everyone has the right to express that opinion out loud and in writing and, in the case of adults who aren’t convicted felons, with a vote. These are sacred rights that must be protected. Thoughts and information are far too important and powerful for any person or organization to be trusted with controlling and regulating them.

Everyone has the right for their opinions to go uncensored. Yes, everyone.

This does not mean that those opinions have the right to go uncriticized, or that every opinion is equally valid, or valid at all.

Everyone’s vote deserves to be counted. I’m not suggesting (in spite of the unethical and wildly illegal suppression of key voter demographics he’s openly admitted to orchestrating) that he didn’t win enough legitimate votes to be elected, or that those votes shouldn’t be binding.

I’m saying, America, you voted wrong.

You voted for racism. You voted for sexism. You voted for homophobia and xenophobia and religious intolerance.

These things are wrong. I will not take that back. I will not waffle and qualify that remark with placating pleasantries.

They. Are. Wrong.

These things are the essence of social injustice, of evil itself, of the worst of human history that good people have worked so long and so hard to free us from.

And yesterday, this country demonstrated that those good people remain the minority of the population to this day.

It’s not that I don’t understand how people fall into the trap of bigotry. I do. When you’re born into an arbitrarily lucky category, it’s tempting as hell to cling to any rationalization for why you deserve your special advantages, and when you’re living a less than charmed life, it’s even more tempting to cling to any rationalization, however arbitrary, for why you belong on top of someone else, anyone else. Power corrupts, and poverty and ignorance turn people on each other.

I understand these concepts. I can see the nurture aspect of what turns people into bigoted assholes. I believe that changes to people’s environments can reduce or even eliminate these arbitrary prejudices, and that’s why I will continue to vote and advocate for anything that improves the average person’s living conditions, educational level, and access to communication with other people of diverse backgrounds.

It’s why I will continue to create and advocate for art that challenges the long-standing bigotry rationalizations of the straight-white-American-male-centric media, rather than reinforcing them.

I want to be a part of creating a future world that respects equality and diversity, and I believe nurture-based changes can do that.

But I do not excuse anyone from responsibility for his or her own bigotry.

Bigotry is the shameful heritage of every culture and every individual on this earth, and the only way things ever get better is through people standing up, in defiance of whatever prejudice they’ve been taught, and saying, “No. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

It is the responsibility of every individual to reject the darkness of the past, and if you were one of those who failed in this responsibility yesterday, it doesn’t only speak to your upbringing. It speaks to your character.

And if you are one of those who did your best for justice and equality yesterday, I beg you to join me in seeing this as a wakeup call.

We are not safe. Inequality and ignorance will not fix themselves. Good people are desperately needed right now.

Do not be quiet because you fear being less “liked,” in any sense of the word.

I’m still working out my next moves. I’m currently lucky enough to be able to manage some spare time on top of my full time work creating art brimming with protest and anti-stereotyping. After yesterday, I’m looking to put some of that time toward volunteer work, hopefully helping to get more books into the hands of more kids, in the hope of a more thoughtful, understanding, and enlightened future.

Your options for helping will be different from mine, but do something. Something other than joking about running to Canada. Something to help make this country and planet a little better, a little kinder, a little fairer.

Today, I’m starting by no longer being too afraid to say something so radical and obvious as this:

What happened yesterday is unconscionable. It is indefensible. It is wrong. And we have a lot of work to do to recover from it and keep moving in the direction of what’s right.